Once upon a time, it was common for an American child to be packed off to school with a rifle on his back and for him to come home smiling and safe in the evening. Shooting clubs, now quietly withering away, were once such a mainstay of American high-school life that in the first half of the 20th century they were regularly installed in the basements of new educational buildings. Now, they are in their death throes, victims of political correctness, a willful misunderstanding of what constitutes “gun safety,” and our deplorable tendency toward litigiousness.

In 1975, New York state had over 80 school districts with rifle teams. In 1984, that had dropped to 65. By 1999 there were just 26. The state’s annual riflery championship was shut down in 1986 for lack of demand. This, sadly, is a familiar story across the country. The clubs are fading from memory, too. A Chicago Tribunereport from 2007 notes the astonishment of a Wisconsin mother who discovered that her children’s school had a range on site. “I was surprised, because I never would have suspected to have something like that in my child’s school,” she told the Tribune. The district’s superintendent admitted that it was now a rarity, confessing that he “often gets raised eyebrows” if he mentions the range to other educators. The astonished mother raised her eyebrows, too — and then led a fight to have the range closed. “Guns and school don’t mix,” she averred. “If you have guns in school, that does away with the whole zero-tolerance policy.”

But how wise is that “zero-tolerance policy”? Until 1989, there were only a few school shootings in which more than two victims were killed. This was despite widespread ownership of — and familiarity with — weapons and an absence of “gun-free zones.” As George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams has observed, for most of American history “private transfers of guns to juveniles were unrestricted. Often a youngster’s 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to him by his father.” This was a right of passage, conventional and uncontroversial across the country. “Gee, Dad . . . A Winchester!” read one particularly famous ad. “In Virginia,” Williams writes, “rural areas had a long tradition of high-school students going hunting in the morning before school, and sometimes storing their guns in the trunk of their cars during the school day, parked on the school grounds.” Many of these guns they could buy at almost any hardware store or gas station — or even by mail order. The 1968 Gun Control Act, supported happily by major gun manufacturers who wished to push out their competition, put a stop to this.

Catalogs and magazines from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s are packed full of gun advertisements aimed at children or parents. “What Every Parent Should Know When a Boy or Girl Wants a Gun,” one proclaims, next to a picture of a young boy and his sister excitedly presenting a “Rifle Catalog.” “Get This Cowboy Carbine with Your Christmas Money,” suggests another. It was placed widely in boys’ magazines by the Daisy Manufacturing Company of Plymouth, Mich. All a teenager needed do to be sent a rifle was send a money order for $2.50 and tick a box confirming they were old enough.

In one cartoon from the 1950s, two boys discuss a rifle in front of their father. “It’s safe for him to use, isn’t it, Dad?” the first boy asks. “Sure,” Dad responds. “Pete knows the code of the junior rifleman.” Back then, Pete almost certainly did. As John Lott Jr. has noted, once upon a time,

it was common for schools to have shooting clubs. Even in New York City, virtually every public high school had a shooting club up until 1969. It was common for high school students to take their guns with them to school on the subways in the morning and turn them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach so the heavy guns would simply be out of the way. After school, students would pick up their guns when it was time for practice.

That is, if they handed them in at all. Up until the ’70s, especially in rural areas, it was commonplace to see kids entering and leaving their school campuses with rifle bags slung lazily over their backs. Guns were left in school lockers, and rifles and shotguns were routinely seen in high-school parking lots, hanging in the rear windows of pickup trucks. A good friend of mine is from North Dakota. His father was telling me recently that in the late 1960s he would hunt before school and then take his rifle — and his bloodstained kills — to school to show his teachers. He and his friends would compare their shooting techniques in the school grounds. Nobody batted an eyelid. In North Dakota, school shootings were non-existent; in the country at large, they were extremely rare.

Despite my having been to school in England, this is not too strange a scene to me. Had you come through my school’s gates on a Thursday afternoon, you might have been horrified to see me, along with a motley collection of boys and girls, 16 to 18 years old, dressed in the camouflage of the Combined Cadet Force and carrying SA-80s around. An SA-80 is the standard-issue rifle used by the British army. It would be accurately described as an “assault rifle,” and it is a sufficiently serious piece of equipment to have been given to British soldiers fighting in both Iraq wars and in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland. We had to learn strict gun safety. We had to disassemble and reassemble our guns under timed conditions. We had to shoot them at targets that were shaped like men. Once, at the school’s firing range, we even fired a machine gun.

The clay-pigeon shooting group was one of my school’s strongest sports teams, and its members would walk nonchalantly around with their shotguns in bags. Sometimes, they would even take their locked guns to lessons and prop them up against the wall. All of our teachers survived the ordeal.

The notion that guns should form a part of education has a rich pedigree in our republic. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his 15-year-old nephew Peter Carr with some scholarly advice. Having instructed him to read “antient history in detail” and expounded a little on which works of “Roman history” and “Greek and Latin poetry” were the most profitable, Jefferson counseled that

a strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks.

Such attitudes would no doubt be regarded as alarming today, as unthinkable as the old — and true — slogan that “America grew up with a rifle in its hand.” So widespread has been the shift in educators’ attitudes that in 1990 Congress legislated to render all schools “gun-free zones.” The law made reasonable exceptions for weapons that were taken to school “for use in a program approved by a school in the school zone” and, regardless, it was struck down on grounds of federal overreach in 1997. Still, that such an exception needed carving out at all would have astonished many a few years earlier, not to mention inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of harmless students who, in the process of going about their business, innocently and safely kept rifles in their cars.

Fear amongst the masses is the result of the lack of education during the past 40 or so years, driven by federally funded education. Firearms should be taught in school just as sex education has been. Not merely the mechanics, but our heritage as well. Mandatory safe firearms education.

In the late ‘60s, our shop teacher enlisted a few parents and started a gun club. My Dad was a volunteer and we covered a lot of safety along with NRA membership, etc. No casualties and none of us became mass killers.

My Cub Scout troop were introduced to single shot .22 rifles back in the late 50s.
My son got his first .22 at age 8. He kept the rifle in his closet. I kept the little magazine and .22s until I was sure he understood how to properly enjoy the shooting sport.

6
posted on 01/21/2013 5:59:52 AM PST
by Eric in the Ozarks
(In the game of life, there are no betting limits)

The decline of school gun clubs coincides with the general loss of common sense and reational judgement along with a turn away from traditional values and follows the rise in the feminization of the government schools.

When I was in Junior High and High school we brought our .22 rifles to school and kept them in our lockers so we could go plinking after school. It was more or less a traditional thing, parents and teachers were aware of it and no one ever abused the permission.

Now the adult gun fearing wussies in charge of schools attack and penalize little children for merely pointing with their index fingers.

I participated in our school’s team. The county required an ambulance and physician to be present at every sporting event. We never saw one at ours. Nobody ever got hurt. I can’t recall a single ND or AD at any competitive shooting event anywhere in the state, but at every football game, somebody always got carted away in an ambulance. Long after I graduated and moved on, I heard the county ordered all rifle teams disbanded and clubs off school property as being “too dangerous” and sending “the wrong signals” to students.

12
posted on 01/21/2013 6:11:18 AM PST
by PowderMonkey
(WILL WORK FOR AMMO)

Shhhhh - be careful. You are getting close to the truth that totally obliterates the current gun nonsense argument:

“The current easy availability of guns is the cause of our gun violence problem.”

It's us pesky people that were alive in the 50s and 60s that undermine the whole thing. THE FACT IS, GUNS HAVE NEVER BEEN AS DIFFICULT TO 0BTAIN AS THEY ARE TODAY. I can't think of one household in the neighborhood that I grew up in that did not have a gun.

Most of the fathers (and there was one in every home that had kids) were World War II veterans. There were 3 M1 Grands, numerous 1911s, and of course the full compliment of hunting rifles and shotguns in my neighborhood alone. None had locks on them, and many were kept loaded and ‘at the ready.’ And we won't even go into what you could mail order back then (who remembers the great “Service Armament” company?)

By today's logic, the 50s should have been a school bloodbath. But they weren't. And it is obvious to all but the complete idiot that the availability of guns has NOTHING to do with the current problems. But guns are an effective way to keep the sheeple from actually focusing on the real problems!

In western PA where I grew up, buck season opened the Monday after Thanksgiving. The schools were closed for that express purpose. Additionally, students could get up to two excused absences per year for hunting, merely by presenting a parental note and a copy of your hunting license. Any number of days, I would take my old 7x57 to school in the morning, put it in my locker, and my dad would pick me up at noon and we'd go hunting.

In 8th grade woodshop, I brought in a .22 and custom built a stock for it. The shop teacher had no problem with it whatsoever.

My high school still has a rifle club, though now it uses air rifles. When I was there (mid-'70s), the NJROTC office space included an armory room. There were long wooden racks of former military training rifles - Winchester 52Ds, Remington 541Ts and of course the more numerous 44US Mossbergs. The crusty old Master Chief even had a few 1911s locked up in there. The school didn't have its own range, but had the use of a USN Reserve facility range a few miles away.

It's true that some of us carried in our own firearms. The upperclassmen had dibs on the Winchesters and Remingtons, and some of the Mossbergs were getting clunky... so my dad found a Winchester 75 target model on a local shop's used gun rack and loaned me the money to buy it. Yep, I used to carry it in the front door of the school. Heck, I used to carry it (cased) on the public bus, before I had a driver's license.

I went to a rural school in North Carolina in the 70’s. Pickup trucks had rifle racks on the back glass (full), and I remember showing off my rifle to the principal in the parking lot...and he showing me his!

22
posted on 01/21/2013 6:42:51 AM PST
by LexRex in TN
("A republic, if you can keep it.......")

Fremont High School Involvement: F.H.T.T. is a non-sanctioned extracurricular activity not offered by the Fremont School System and is only supported to their legal liability limitations. Although the school takes this stand, they still help the program by allowing school announcements, gathering of academic information, and permitting the issuance of activity letters. This trapshooting program is financed and supported by private clubs and through the generosity of individuals who have participated in the program in past years.

A few years ago a local school district wanted to start a rifle team and they simply put out empty cigar boxes at most of the gun dealers checkout area with a sign that said “Help the Lamar school district start a rifle team”.

I dropped in an extra twenty and mine was one of many. I also saw a hundred dollar bill in the box. I think they were successful in their fundraising as when I dropped in the twenty there looked to be pretty close to a thousand in the box.

In the late 40s I was in fourth grade and on the school sidewalk safety patrol. We had to be at school early to serve as street crossing guards, we stayed a little late after classes for more crossing guard duty, and several times a month we got to go to the police pistol range and shoot .22 rifles.

When I bought my own .22 rifle at age 11 I already had 3 years of gun safety and marksmanship training.

29
posted on 01/21/2013 6:58:53 AM PST
by SWAMPSNIPER
(The Second Amendment, a Matter of Fact, Not a Matter of Opinion)

This was Massapequa in the sixties...I doubt that it's still in place. I'm on the NS for decades and only swing by the old grounds to hit All American once or twice a year.

We lived down by the water and there were two fibgers out into the bay that were still undeveloped. They were pretty large parcels of mixed sand dunes, briar patches, woodland and brackish swamp...great places for a bunch of kids to spend all day and never see an adult. When I hit my teens we hunted geese down at the end. It was not at all unusual to see three or four guys walking through the neighborhood with 12 gauges over their shoulders. That sight today would bring DHS SWAT teams.

Both peninsulae were developed in the seventies (hi-end houses). They were all severely damaged by Sandy.

This was Massapequa in the sixties...I doubt that it's still in place. I'm on the NS for decades and only swing by the old grounds to hit All American once or twice a year.

We lived down by the water and there were two fingers out into the bay that were still undeveloped. They were pretty large parcels of mixed sand dunes, briar patches, woodland and brackish swamp...great places for a bunch of kids to spend all day and never see an adult. When I hit my teens we hunted geese down at the end. It was not at all unusual to see three or four guys walking through the neighborhood with 12 gauges over their shoulders. That sight today would bring DHS SWAT teams.

Both peninsulae were developed in the seventies (hi-end houses). They were all severely damaged by Sandy.

So true. At my High School in the early 1980s we had a school skeet team. We met during school, often took our shotguns to school, and our successes were in the school paper. There were zero firearms “incidents” at my school in those days. You were required to take a safety course to Letter for Skeet.

In 1980 (7th grade) I would bring my shotgun to school and keep it in my locker. After school would carry it on to the bus and go to my friends farm to do some pheasant hunting. The good ole days that weren’t so long ago.

35
posted on 01/21/2013 7:29:27 AM PST
by cornfedcowboy
(Trust in God, but empty the clip.)

When I was in 8th grade a kid on the rifle team from the local high school came home with a 22 and killed his parents his sister and the family dog so he could have the house to party. That was in a Chicago suburb 1969.

When I was in 8th grade a kid on the rifle team from the local high school came home with a 22 and killed his parents his sister and the family dog so he could have the house to party. That was in a Chicago suburb 1969.

In Chicago in the 60s you could as a teen board a CTA bus with a shotgun, sit next to the driver, get off at the last stop on North Avenue and hunt in the fields. Go home with your catch and nobody would ever say a word, be scared or call a cop.

What’s changed is liberalism. The psychology of fear and losing, devilishness and infantilism by government. It’s taken only a short time. The 19th Amendment made all the difference.

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